Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  Hall starts by examining the ill-considered grammatical comments of several well-known authors, including Coleridge. He takes the same approach as Lounsbury and Whitney, refuting these authors’ statements with copious literary examples to the contrary. He presents these mostly in the form of long footnotes. For instance, he refutes Coleridge’s criticism of writers who use whose for nonhumans (instead of of which) by stating that whose “has had the support of high authorities for several hundred years.” He reinforces this claim with a footnote nearly a page long—a relentless list of quotations that starts with a fifteenth-century manuscript and ends with Samuel Johnson.17 Hall believes with his fellow philologists that common usage is the only reasonable way to determine whether a word or phrase is acceptable.

  After these preliminaries Hall turns to his main business—taking down White. He announces that he intends to review the weaknesses of Words and Their Uses in detail in order to show what happens to “one who puts his faith over-confidingly in dictionaries and intuition.” Hall has no more patience with intuition than the College Courant authors. His way of critiquing White is to quote one of White’s usage strictures and then show that it’s based on a lack of knowledge about English.

  For example, White has pronounced against using experience as a verb, claiming that a diligent search turned up only one example of the word in an authoritative source. Hall snaps, “Since ‘diligent search’ may mean, with Mr. White, industry in turning over the pages of dictionaries, one can scarcely wonder” at his faulty conclusions. Hall’s own results have been somewhat different. He says, “How long we have possessed the verb experience I cannot say, but as long ago as 1531 it was used by Sir Thomas Elyot.” He follows up with an onslaught of quotations from giants of English literature.18

  The remainder of the book—nearly one hundred pages—proceeds along similar lines. Like Lounsbury and Whitney, Hall has been struck by White’s judgment that “there is a misuse of words which can be justified by … no usage, however general.” Like them, he considers it nonsensical. He brushes aside White’s style judgments with the comment, “His animadversions where original are, I believe, in almost every case, founded either on caprice, on defective information, or on both.” Unfortunately, Hall fears that White’s writing style is calculated to appeal to the masses. His dogmatism and positiveness, says Hall, are “of that peremptory stamp which insures the prompt submission of the unthinking multitude.”19

  He calls White’s belief that speech is the product of reason and logic an “incoherent fiction,” pointing out the same problem that the Courant authors notice—identical facts may lead people to different conclusions. He phrases it in more colorful terms though. “It is not given to everyone,” he sneers, “to enjoy those intimate relations with reason which have been vouchsafed to Mr. White as one of the elect.”20

  Hall sums up his problem with White this way: “Reduced to its simplest expression, the principle on which Mr. White criticizes our language is whim. The very fundamentals of true philology he has still to acquire.” In fact, Hall’s complaint is the same as Lounsbury and Whitney’s—White is not qualified to write about English. Not only do his rules and guidelines contradict normal usage, they show an ignorance of etymology. In order to write a serious book about language use, “it is by no means enough to trust to memory and to pore over dictionaries,” says Hall. It’s also necessary to read widely and “with the eye of a philologist.” Hall surmises that “success in one department of letters has emboldened him to venture his cunning in another department, and one in which he is totally incapable of distinguishing himself.”21

  Hall ends with the unconvincing declaration that he does not feel any personal hostility toward White. His reason for attacking Words and Their Uses is the same as Lounsbury and Whitney’s—the book has spread grammatical confusion among the uninformed. Otherwise, he insists, White’s mistakes “would never have moved me to write in a polemic spirit.” He has only done so because they provided a way of offering a few hints on the necessity of “patient inquiry, cautious reflection, and dispassionate judgment” when attempting to practice philology.22

  Reviews for False Philology were mixed. One magazine review begins, “This is a curiously scornful and acrid discussion of questions about the derivation, meaning, and use of words, accompanied with the impalement … of Mr. Richard Grant White.” The reviewer nonetheless finds the book “stimulating, learned, useful, and almost always correct.” Another review is more flattering, suggesting that Hall wrote with “genuine modesty and zeal, for the sake of our old mother tongue.” The reviewer praises him for his lack of linguistic extremism, which gives some idea of the intemperate tone of most usage commentary.23

  The Nation featured a review by William Dwight Whitney, which he used mainly to fight another round of his own with White. Whitney remarks approvingly on the term “false philology,” which he thinks accurately describes the “dreary and barren” field of verbal criticism. Of course he also approves of Hall’s “pungent and able” criticisms. He spends most of the review, however, skewering the second edition of Words and Their Uses, released after Hall wrote False Philology. Whitney scoffs at White’s new preface, in which White defends himself against Whitney’s and other people’s previous attacks by saying that he has never made any claim to be a philologist. Whitney doesn’t accept this excuse. “In these days of philological light and knowledge,” he declares, “no man has the right to come forward and lecture the community on the proprieties of speech, and then try to creep away from adverse criticism under cover of the plea that he is ‘no philologist.’”

  As far as Whitney can ascertain, White’s second edition is merely a longer version of his first edition, “in which the author defends at greater length his old dogma that usage does not govern language.” White, just as wrongheaded as ever, still apparently believes in the superiority of his own linguistic judgments. Whitney says ruefully, “If, then, Dr. Hall imagined that his criticisms would have any real effect on his antagonist, he has probably by this time seen his error.”24

  Obviously, White could not allow Hall’s attack to pass unnoticed. His answer was a vitriolic three-part Galaxy essay of several thousand words titled “Punishing a Pundit.” This scathing rejoinder had a twofold aim. White wanted to show that Hall’s scholarship was not nearly as impressive as Hall believed it to be, but he also wanted to argue that scholarship isn’t what counts when writing about usage. White thought that Hall, like Lounsbury and Whitney, fundamentally misunderstood what it takes to practice verbal criticism. Good taste, good judgment, and a feel for linguistic style are what matter, according to White. He considered Hall lacking in all three, therefore not really qualified to write about the subject.

  White’s Galaxy articles are mostly devoted to picking apart Hall’s arguments. Before getting down to cases, however, White takes some time to insult “Dr. Hall” personally. He implies that Hall’s decision to live in England even though he’s an American has something disreputable about it. He also belittles Hall’s scholarly credentials. An English university has seen fit to award Hall a doctorate, but White is “sufficiently familiar with the scholastic essentials to the honorary dignity borne by him not to be unduly impressed by it.” He himself saw through the author at a glance, he says, “for even a millstone may be seen through if it has a hole in the middle.”

  Hall, a man born “without a sense of decency,” is nothing more than a verbal critic himself, says White, but one who has the remarkable gall to criticize better writers than he is. White accuses Hall of writing a book not to improve or protect the English language—“not to help his readers to understand it, or to use it with simplicity, clearness and force—but merely to show that he knows everything knowable about it.… He, Fitzedward Hall, formerly Vermont Yankee, now British resident … Professor of Sanskrit, and Pundit by brevet…” He had originally planned to ignore the book, which he felt was beneath his notice. However, since a respectable journal like The
Nation has thought it appropriate to devote column space to a glowing review, he feels that it’s his duty to discuss Hall’s book after all.25

  Hall’s excesses offer a tempting target and White scores some bull’s-eyes. He jeers at Hall’s weakness for ornate words and phrases, writing, “Upon his pages swarm such words as provection, neoterism, antithet,” and such phrases as “criterion of grammaticalness.” White feels that anyone with “a loving sense of real English” would shrink from these pedantic absurdities. He considers Hall’s long lists of example quotations pointless, calling them “mere repetitions of this or that word, which are of little or no significance.” They are just a way for Dr. Hall to show off.

  White also complains with some justification of the “sourness of temper” that leads Hall to “speak injuriously of men for the mere sake of saying something to hurt them.” He treats with contempt Hall’s assertion that Hall has not attacked White out of vindictiveness. He points out that Hall has searched Words and Their Uses “with the eye of a mosquito,” even attacking what he must have realized were typographical errors.26

  White trained an equally intense gaze on Hall’s book. He uses most of his two remaining articles making copiously detailed critiques of Hall’s arguments and writing style, and pointing out his limitations as a scholar. He uses descriptions like “amazing pretence” and “pompous ignorance.” White also makes it clear that he stands by everything he said in Words and Their Uses. For instance, he devotes three pages to defending his condemnation of the new word jeopardize, even adding to his original arguments.

  At the end of this furious assault, White seems satisfied that he has adequately destroyed his enemy’s position and can afford to offer one or two backhanded compliments. He gives Hall credit for having “every accomplishment in English except the faculty of understanding and the ability to write it.” Hall’s learning is considerable, says White, even though he has no “true philological instinct.” Finally, White announces that he forgives Hall for his splenetic attack and now, having exposed his critic as a “mere etymologist,” is ready to turn his attention to some worthier topic.27

  * * *

  In fact, neither White nor Hall showed any sign of retreating from the field. Both remained active partisans in the ongoing conflict between philologists and verbal critics—a conflict that never got any closer to being resolved because neither side could accept the other’s basic premises. The two positions may be irreconcilable. Quarrels over the value of specialist’s knowledge versus educated taste still blow up regularly, with the issues no nearer to being resolved than they were in Hall and White’s day.

  The closing paragraphs of White’s answer to Hall show how far apart the critics and the philologists really were. White clearly felt that he was making a devastating criticism by calling Hall a “mere etymologist” without literary taste or skill. Hall would not have interpreted that word the same way. From Hall’s perspective, etymologists—trained scholars of language—were far more qualified to comment on usage than an amateur like White, however literary he might be. That was the whole point of his attack in False Philology. White refused to accept that idea. He considered education and taste the only qualifications necessary for making linguistic judgments. The fact that Hall knew a lot more than he did about the structure of English didn’t impress him at all.

  None of the 1870s participants in the usage debates ever budged from their original opinions. White’s confidence in his own judgment remained unshaken in spite of repeated batterings at the hands of philologists. During the two years following his clash with Hall, he wrote five linked Galaxy articles with the title “Linguistic and Literary Notes and Queries.” These consist mainly of responses to the many letters he received asking for his opinion on disputed words and grammatical structures. His replies indicate that his linguistic attitudes were as rigid as ever.

  White still disapproved of grammar as a subject of formal study. “I wish that so many of my correspondents were not so anxious on the subject,” he writes, “so disturbed because sentences won’t ‘parse,’ so solicitous to find a ‘rule.’” He reiterates his belief that the best way to learn good English is to “read the best authors and talk with the most cultivated people.”28 White also still believed in applying the criterion of logic to new coinages. Several letter writers have asked him about the word scientist, a recent coinage that was becoming popular. He replies that he finds the word “intolerable both as being unlovely in itself and improper in its formation.” If anything, the word should be sciencist. Even that, however, illogically combines a word derived from Latin (science) with a Greek ending (–ist). It would be more appropriate to say man of science.

  He still rejected widespread use as an argument for accepting certain words and phrases. When one correspondent asks him to weigh in on the increasingly agitated “split infinitive” debate, he agrees with the man’s description of the usage as a “barbarism of speech.” He says, “The examples which [the letter writer] gives are in themselves a condemnation.” Then he adds, “Distinguished precedent might be shown for this construction, as for many other bad uses of language; but it is eminently unenglish.”29 For White, a long pedigree was not enough to render a usage respectable English, in spite of what Hall or his colleagues might argue.

  White steadily produced books and articles, not only on language, but on Shakespeare, music criticism, and other topics, until shortly before he died in 1885. His second collection of Galaxy columns, Every-Day English, published in 1880, confirms his unhesitating commitment to his earlier work. Writing about Words and Their Uses in the preface, he says, “The views taken in the book in question … seem … to need no apology or modification; at least I have none to offer.”30 Both books would remain popular with the public well into the twentieth century. Although White encouraged his readers to polish their speech habits by reading good authors and associating with literate people, many obviously considered his books a faster route to achieving their linguistic aims.

  Hall also remained in the fray throughout his career. He spent most of his time editing and translating Indian literature and writing on scholarly philological topics, but that didn’t stifle his urge to spar with verbal critics. His attacks were not limited to White. In 1880 he published an article in The Nineteenth Century magazine titled “English Rational and Irrational.” It is a choleric blast against “would-be philologists who collect waifs and strays of antipathies and prejudices, amplify the worthless hoard by their own whimseys, and … digest the whole into essays and volumes.”31 The piece doesn’t mention White. Instead it attacks several popular writers who have been foolish enough to voice an opinion on word use.

  He also engaged in extended combat with Ralph Olmsted Williams, author of a book about dictionaries. For several years, they traded criticisms and rejoinders in the pages of The Dial and Modern Language Notes. Most of their discussions concern such nitpicky issues as whether part from or part with is more correct, with neither man giving much ground.

  Hall devoted his last years mainly to unpaid work on Oxford University’s new dictionary project. Still hale and energetic, he spent at least four hours a day reading and correcting page proofs and providing example quotations culled from his extensive reading and his own memory. By the time he died in 1901 at the age of seventy-five, he had contributed several thousand quotations to the still unfinished Oxford English Dictionary. These included over two thousand examples from the dialect spoken in his adopted home of Suffolk.

  Whitney also continued to write about usage, although he concentrated on scholarly work. He produced grammars of Sanskrit, German, and French, as well as a second book of modern linguistic thought titled The Life and Growth of Language. He also edited The Century Dictionary, an important resource for later dictionary makers, including the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. Illness forced him to retire in 1886 and he died eight years later, aged sixty-seven.

  Seven years after the Courant articles appeared, Wh
itney published a textbook called Essentials of English Grammar. The book is an unusual melding of modern linguistic insights with traditional notions of proper speech. In his opening remarks, Whitney says, “It has been my constant endeavor to bear in mind the true position of the grammarian … that he is simply a recorder and arranger of the usages of language, and in no manner or degree a lawgiver.”32 He notes that he has provided only a very few “set rules.” He believes that the point of studying a grammar of one’s own language is to gain an understanding of the linguistic principles involved. Rote memorization won’t help students toward that goal. Throughout the book Whitney makes an effort to explain the why as well as the how of English usage.

  He explains that the point of grammar books is to help students recognize the difference between “good English” and “bad English.” He defines good English as “those words,… and those ways of putting them together, which are used by the best speakers, the people of best education.” Bad English is whatever those speakers avoid. Whitney reminds students that “grammar does not at all make rules and laws for language. It only reports the facts of good language.” Grammar books, he suggests, should be used more as reference guides than instructional manuals.33

  Whitney’s advice here almost echoes White’s plea to his readers to be less “solicitous to find ‘a rule.’” Both men believed in a standard for English and both thought it should be based on “the best speakers.” The difference lay in how they determined the best speech. Whitney looked to the common everyday usages of reasonably educated people, especially when those usages were backed up by literary precedent. White proposed standards based mainly on his own feelings about individual words and grammatical constructions, without regard for how well established or widespread they were.